The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTEAt most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.
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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.
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A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable.
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Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.
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Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
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It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
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In order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories…The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
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At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
ELENA FERRANTE